In recent times, proliferation of audio-visual media has seen a dramatic increase, especially due to Internet-based services and newer technological broadcast platforms and formats. For example, cable and satellite providers supply content on-demand, while radio programs have gone digital and stream their content via the Internet. The majority of this delivered media is professionally authored, yet even amateurs have recently entered the content creation and dissemination business with the advent of video blogs and services that allow members to broadcast themselves.
With so much media available to a content consumer, it is becoming increasingly popular to leverage existing media for creating compilations or mash-ups, parodies and the like that are derived from existing media. Unfortunately, the majority of the media used for such derivative work is professionally created and employed without permission from the author. Thus, most well-known services that allow members to upload their own work, and who might implicitly or explicitly authorize its reproduction, in fact, are often utilizing original work of others that is not so authorized, giving rise to copyright and other legal issues. Thus far, there is no good way to monetize these services; hence, although rampant with copyright infringement, little has been done to address the copyright issues.
Moreover, conventional media editor tools typically overwrite the original media when changes are made, which is a destructive form of editing, since the original media has often been irrevocably changed due to the “lossy” nature of certain transformations. For example, if some original media is, say, rotated 90 degrees clockwise to produce derivative work A, then a subsequent transformation to derivative work A to rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise will not result in an identical version of the original, as data was lost during the transformations. To avoid this situation, it is possible to maintain the original asset and save various versions of derivative works individually. However, this approach is extremely expensive in terms of storage resources, especially with high-grade media, and further presents copyright or other legal issues when the original media is copied without authorization or when a derivative work is fixed in a tangible medium or otherwise violates copyright regulations.